Coca-Cola donates land for civil rights museum

The Coca-Cola Co. announced Monday it is donating $10 million worth of prime downtown land to the city to develop a civil rights museum in the hometown of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Coca-Cola chairman and chief executive Neville Isdell said his company is donating 2½ acres near the Georgia Aquarium and the new World of Coca-Cola, now under construction. Coke previously donated nine acres for the aquarium.

“There is no more appropriate home for a civil rights museum than the cradle of America’s civil rights movement,” Isdell said. “This city is the principal guardian of Dr. King’s dream. It our duty — as citizens of Atlanta — not just to preserve his dream but to build upon it.”

Isdell said the idea for the museum came from Mayor Shirley Franklin, who said in January a civil rights museum belongs in Atlanta.

A spokeswoman for Franklin said Monday she had no details on the museum or who would develop it.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was a leading civil rights activist during the 1960s, said Atlanta is the “capital of the modern-day civil rights movement” and should have a civil rights museum, just like other cities that were prominent in the movement, such as Birmingham and Montgomery in Alabama and Memphis, Tenn.

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Lewis said the proposed museum will complement the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, where King and his wife, Coretta, are buried.

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“There is a role for the King center, but there is a role for a major civil rights museum” in Atlanta, Lewis said.

Atlanta also is home to King’s collected papers. In June, a group of Atlanta philanthropic leaders and businesses — including Coca-Cola — bought the papers from the King family. King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, will house the collection.